Friday, May 16, 2014

I woke up this morning with some dialogue from a nonexistent game I was playing in my dream. There were a lot of NPCs fighting with me, like Mass Effect. Two characters were having an argument—one was a human like Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, and the other was a philosophizing robot with a voice like Legion from Mass Effect. They recently met.

Captain: Not even a little gratitude for me swooping in and saving your ass back there?Robot: Though I had not yet met you, I know that you always would have saved me.Captain: What does that mean?Robot: The world was designed so that you would save me. That's the way it always happens.Captain: Always? Are you implying that you... reincarnated?Robot: Not precisely. Each choice we make is the beginning of a new reality, and then the old one ceases to exist. Some choices compound to produce a vastly different reality from others that did not come to pass. Perhaps in one, you too are synthetic life. Or that which saves me is a force of nature. Perhaps in another reality I am a dog. In each case I am here, and I am saved by some seemingly coincidental, fortuitous event, and it matters not what form that takes. My role today was to be saved, regardless of the form taken of either me or my savior.Captain: (raises eyebrow)Robot: That said... thank you.Captain: So... you believe that everything is predetermined, then. We have no free will. Well, I think that's bulls—Robot: Not precisely. We all make choices. Even synthetic beings make choices that ensure our continued survival. But regardless of those choices, in every reality, a pattern is set, and we all inevitably play our role in that pattern. An architect set this plan in motion when time began in our reality. We know not who or what this architect was, but it must exist beyond or reality, beyond our comprehension.Captain: God. Humans called that architect God, and we stopped believing in him centuries ago.Robot: Precisely. But perhaps you were wrong to. Or perhaps that is also a part of the pattern.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

I had a great idea for a website, which I would host at oplmgtfy.com. But that's way too much work, so I'll just tell you what I thought of. It would be a complete ripoff of Let Me Google That For You, but this one would be Old People Let Me Google That For You.

[Screenshot of a Windows XP computer desktop completely filled with icons.]1. Double-click on the internet.
[Shows mouse cursor pointing at "Shortcut to Internet Explorer (3)".]2. Try it several times. You have to click really fast!
[Internet Explorer window opens, with six browser toolbars installed. Several malware popup ads appear.]3. Close all the popups.4. Click in the white box next to the word MSN.5. Type "the google".
[While typing, a dialog trying to get you to subscribe to Norton appears, and also one from the fake virus scanner that they downloaded, and also a script error from one of their browser toolbars. Mouse cursor searches frantically for the X button without reading them.]6. Don't worry about those; it always does that.
[Page failed to load.]7. Hmmm, this stupid thing's always acting up. Call your son.